Friends, Lovers, Chocolate id-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She made a conscious effort to put the case out of her mind.

  She had the moral energy, she thought, for one issue at a time.

  She could do nothing to help that schoolteacher and his sorrowing family. But she could help Ian, if he wanted her help—

  which was another matter. Now she was looking at the first newspaper in her targeted week, and she ran her eye over each column, scanning the pages for the headline that she wanted.

  “Major Row Hits City Parks.” No. “Lord Provost Defends Road Plans, Says Public Will Come to Welcome Them.” No. “Police Dog Turns on Handler, Is Demoted.” No. (She avoided the F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  temptation to read that one; she had to get on with the task in hand. Demoted?)

  It was all the typical stuff of local papers: the planning disputes, the school prize-givings, the crimes great and small. It was immensely distracting, as local papers always are, but she persisted and, four days into her search (in newspaper terms), she came across the information for which she had been looking.

  A young man had been killed in what appeared to be a hit-and-run incident. There was his photograph, across two columns, a young man of twenty, wearing a white shirt and a plain tie, smiling into the camera. Rory Macleod, the caption read. Former pupil of James Gillespie’s School. Shortly after the celebration of his twentieth birthday.

  Isabel studied the face. He had been the sort of young man she had walked past every day in Bruntsfield, or George Street, or anywhere like that. He could have been a student or, with his white shirt and tie, a bank clerk from the Bank of Scotland in Morningside. In other words, he was unexceptional, as she had imagined he would be.

  She turned to the report. He had played in a squash match in Colinton, the newspaper said, and had then gone with friends for a pint of beer at the Canny Man’s. A friend had walked with him as far as the post office and then had left him to go up to the Braids while he had turned left into Nile Grove.

  Possibly only five or ten minutes after the friend had said goodbye to him, he was found in Nile Grove itself, lying on the edge of the pavement, half hidden by a parked car. An ambulance was called and he was taken to the Infirmary, but he died later that night. He had been only twenty yards away from his front door. The newspaper then gave the address of that front door 1 1 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h and a quote from an uncle, who spoke of the devastation of the family and the sense of loss at the ending of a life so full of promise. And that was all.

  Isabel read through the report several times. She noted the number of the house in Nile Grove and the name of the uncle who had been interviewed. He had an unusual name, Archi-bald, which would make it comparatively easy to trace him, should she need to do so. She took a last look at the photograph, at the face of Rory Macleod, and then turned to the next day’s Evening News. There was a further small item on the incident, confirming that Rory appeared to have been struck by a car and fatally injured. The police had appealed for anybody who had been in the vicinity of Nile Grove that night to come forward.

  “Anything you saw may be important,” the police spokesman said. “Any unusual behaviour. Anything out of the ordinary.”

  She looked at the following day’s paper, but there was nothing more on the incident. So she closed the folder and started to carry it back to the young man at the enquiry desk. He saw her coming and leapt to his feet.

  “Miss Dalhousie,” he whispered. “Please let me take that.”

  She handed him the folder and thanked him.

  “How is the Review going?” he asked her, as he took the folder from her.

  “I’m almost putting the next issue to bed,” said Isabel. “It’s a busy time for me.”

  He nodded. He would have liked to have asked her for a job, but he could not bring himself to do so. He would stay in the library service, he thought, and become old like those above him. And Isabel, looking at him, at his eager face, reflected on mortality. He could have been the young man in that photograph, but was not. Rory had died instead of this young man, F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  because Rory had had the bad luck to be at that precise point in Nile Grove at the exact moment when the driver of the car had struck him. And then she thought of the driver. That could have been me, she reflected, or this young librarian, but it was not.

  That had been a man with a high brow and hooded eyes, and with that scar. Or it could have been. Just could have been.

  S H E H A D A R R A N G E D to meet Jamie at the Elephant House, a café farther down George IV Bridge. It was a spacious, L-shaped room, with windows at the back which looked down on Candlemaker Row. High-ceilinged and with exposed floorboards, it had a slightly cavernous feel to it—a cavern adorned with pictures and models of elephants on every wall. Isabel felt comfortable there, amongst its elephants and students, and regularly chose it as a place to meet her friends. And if her Sunday Philosophy Club were ever to meet again—it seemed to be impossible to find a date that suited the members—then this would have been a good place to sit and talk about the nature of good and our understanding of the world. For Jamie, who taught bassoon for six hours a week at George Heriot’s School, it was less of a meeting place than a convenient place to go for a strong coffee after finishing with his pupils.

  He was already there when she arrived, sitting at a table near a window in the back part of the room, a cup of coffee in front of him and immersed in one of the café’s copies of the Scotsman. He looked up as she arrived and rose to his feet in welcome.

  “You’ve been here for hours,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Five minutes,” he said. “Still on page three of the newspaper.”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h He put the paper to one side and offered to go and buy her coffee.

  “That can wait, Jamie,” said Isabel. “I’ve been reading the newspaper too.”

  He glanced at the paper. “And?”

  “The Evening News, ” she went on. “In the library.”

  “What an odd thing to do,” he said. “Unless . . .” He paused.

  Isabel had that look about her which told him she was on to something. He could always tell when she was about to embark on some temporary obsession. It was a look in her eyes, perhaps, a look of determination, a look that said I shall not rest until I get to the bottom of this.

  For a moment Isabel appeared embarrassed. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I suppose that I am on to something.” She held up a hand. “I know, I know: you don’t have to tell me again.”

  Jamie sighed. “I wasn’t going to lecture you. I know that that’s no use—you’ll go right ahead, no matter what I say. All I would say is this: Be careful. One of these days you’re going to get involved in something which gets seriously out of hand. You will, you know. You really will.”

  “I understand that perfectly well,” said Isabel. “And I’m grateful to you for saying it. I do listen to you, you know.”

  Jamie took a sip of his coffee. He wiped a small trace of milk from his upper lip. “It doesn’t always seem like that to me.”

  “But I do!” protested Isabel. “I listened to you over that business with Minty Auchterlonie. I listened to you very seriously.”

  “You were lucky there,” said Jamie. “You could have got seriously out of your depth. But let’s not talk about the past. What are you getting involved in now?”

  Over the next few minutes Isabel told him about her chance F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  meeting with Ian and about their conversation at the Scottish Arts Club. Jamie was interested—she could tell that—although he, like Isabel herself, seemed incredulous when she mentioned cellular memory.

  “There’s a rational explanation for these things,” he said when she had finished talking. “There always is. And I just don’t see how anything other th
an brain cells could store memory. I just don’t. And that’s on the strength of my school biology course. It’s that basic.”

  “But that’s exactly the problem,” retorted Isabel. “We’re all stuck with the same tried and trusted ideas. If we refused to entertain the possibility of something radically different, then we’d never make any progress—ever. We’d still be thinking that the sun revolved round the earth.”

  Jamie affected surprise. “Isabel, don’t start challenging that now!”

  Isabel accepted his scepticism good-naturedly. “I should point out that I’m completely agnostic on all this,” she said. “All I’m doing is trying to keep an open mind.”

  “And where does this take you?” asked Jamie. “So what if the cells in the transplanted heart, or whatever, think they remember a face. So what?”

  Isabel looked about her, for no reason other than that she felt a slight twinge of fear. That was in itself irrational, but she felt it.

  “The face that he remembers could be the face of the driver who killed the donor,” she said. “It could have been imprinted in memory—whatever sort of memory—after he had been knocked down and the driver came and looked down at him.”

  Jamie’s lip curled. “Really, Isabel!”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

  “Yes,” she said quickly. “Really. And if it is the face of the driver, then we may have a description of the person responsible for the death.”

  Jamie thought for a moment. It was now obvious to him what Isabel had been doing in the library. “You’ve found a report of the accident?” he asked. “You know who the donor was?”

  “I think so,” said Isabel. “We know that the donor was a young man. That’s as much as Ian knows. So I put two and two together and concluded that a sudden, violent death on the day on which they called Ian in for his transplant would probably supply the identity of the donor. And it has. There’s nothing bril-liant in that. It’s all pretty obvious.”

  But was it? It crossed her mind that she was assuming too much, and too readily. There might have been other incidents, other young men who could have been donors, but no, Edinburgh was not a very large place. It would be unlikely that two young men had died a sudden death that night. Her assumption, she decided, was reasonable.

  Rather against his better judgement, Jamie felt himself being drawn in. He could not resist Isabel, he had decided.

  There was something about her that fascinated him: the intel-lectual curiosity, the style, the verve. And she was an attractive woman too. If she had been a bit younger—quite a bit younger—

  then he could have imagined that she would have been every bit as exciting as Cat. Damn Cat!

  “So?” he said. “So who is he? And what do we do?”

  We do, he thought. I should have said you do, but once again, I’ve played straight into Isabel’s hands. I’m trapped. In nets of golden wires.

  Isabel was oblivious of Jamie’s struggle with himself. She had invited him to meet her to discuss what she had found out; F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  she had not asked him to join her in her inquiry. Of course, if he wished to do so, then that would be very helpful; but she had not asked him.

  “Well,” she began, “we now know who that unfortunate young man was and where he lived. We know that the police appealed for information.”

  “And that’s it,” said Jamie. “We . . . you don’t know whether they ever found the driver.”

  Isabel conceded that this remained unknown. But now, at least, they had a description of the person who might have been responsible.

  “But what do you do with that?” asked Jamie. “Go to the police? What would you tell them? That somebody else is having visions of a face and here’s a drawing?” He laughed. “You can imagine the reception you’d get.”

  Isabel thought about this. She had not imagined going to the police—just yet. Jamie was right in thinking that it would be difficult to convince them to take her seriously and that they would be unlikely to pursue the matter further; unless, of course, the push came from the family of the victim. If they could be persuaded to do something about it, then the police could hardly refuse a request from them at least to consider Ian’s story.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by Jamie. “Why are you doing this, Isabel?” he asked mildly. “What’s the point?”

  She looked at him. It was her duty, was it not? If this was really information about who was responsible for the hit-and-run incident, then surely she had a duty to do something about it—any citizen would have that duty simply because he or she was a citizen. And there was more to it than that. By listening to Ian’s story, she felt that she had been drawn into a moral 1 2 2

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h relationship with him and his situation. Isabel had firm views on moral proximity and the obligations it created. We cannot choose the situations in which we become involved in this life; we are caught up in them whether we like it or not. If one encounters the need of another, because of who one happens to be, or where one happens to find oneself, and one is in a position to help, then one should do so. It was as simple as that.

  She shrugged. “The point is that I have to do this,” she said.

  “I can’t walk away from it. That driver needs to be called to account. And Ian needs to know why he’s seeing that face. In each case, the solution lies in the uncovering of the truth.”

  Jamie looked at his watch. He had another pupil—this time one who came to his flat in Saxe-Coburg Street on the other side of town, and he would have to leave. But he still wanted to find out what the next step was. Isabel may have been incorrigi-ble in his view—and she was—but he still found everything that she did very interesting.

  “What now?”

  “I go and see the family,” said Isabel.

  “And tell them that you know who might have been responsible for their son’s death?”

  “Probably,” said Isabel. “Although I shall have to be careful about that. One never knows.”

  “I’ve said it before,” warned Jamie. “Just be careful. You can’t go charging into people’s grief, you know.”

  Jamie said that and then stood up. He had not intended to offend Isabel, but he had. She looked down at the table, which was of darkened pine board, with no cloth. It had been a refec-tory table somewhere, in a school perhaps, and was worn with age. She stared at it.

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  Jamie reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, lightly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it to come out like that.”

  She said nothing. Jamie had made her sound like one of those people who intruded on the sorrow of others; those reporters from the gutter press who hounded the bereaved so that they could get a story or a photograph. It was not like that with her. She did not want to see these people out of curiosity; she did not want to see them at all. Did Jamie not understand that she was acting out of duty? That there were times when you just had to do that? The easiest thing to do would be to forget all about this; to tell Ian that she had been interested in his story but that she could do nothing about these visions of his. Yet that would be to ignore the fact that the family of the young man who had been killed might have a very strong desire to find out who was responsible for the incident. What might they say to her if they knew that she knew something and had not brought it to their attention?

  Jamie sat down again. “Look,” he said. “I have to go. And I’m sorry that I said that. I’ll phone you soon. And I’ll help you do whatever it is that you want to do. Is that all right?”

  “Yes. But you don’t have to.”

  “I know I don’t, Isabel. But you seem . . . Well, let’s just leave it. We’re friends, aren’t we? You help your friends. That’s just the way it is. Sometimes I wish you were . . . a bit different, but you aren’t.” He stood up again, pi
cking up his bassoon case as he did. “And I actually rather like you the way you are, you know?”

  Isabel looked up at him. “Thank you,” she said. “You’ve been a very good friend to me.”

  He left, turning round and waving to her as he went out of 1 2 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the front door. She returned his wave and then, after treating herself to a Danish pastry and a quick cup of coffee, she left too.

  Outside, at the end of George IV Bridge, where the road sloped down to the Grassmarket, a small group of tourists stood about the statue of the small Scottish terrier, Greyfriars Bobby. Isabel walked past them slowly and heard the guide intone: “This statue commemorates the loyalty of a dog who sat by his master’s grave in the Greyfriars Kirkyard for fourteen years. He never left his post.”

  She saw the expression on the face of one of the members of the group as he heard this. She saw him lean forward, shaking his head in disbelief. But such loyalty did exist, and not just amongst dogs. People stuck by others for years and years, in the face of all the odds, and it should be relief, not disbelief, that one felt on witnessing it. Jamie was loyal, she thought. There he was remaining devoted to Cat, even when there was no hope. It was touching, in a way—rather like the story of Greyfriars Bobby. Perhaps there should be a statue of Jamie somewhere in Bruntsfield. This young man stood outside his former girlfriend’s delicatessen for fourteen years, the inscription might state. Isabel smiled at the ridiculous idea. One should not smile about such things, she thought, but what was the alternative? To be miserable?

  C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N

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  SHE HAD NOT INTENDED to visit the house in Nile Grove until a few days later, but after an evening of thinking about it, she decided that she would go the next morning. It would be difficult to explain over the phone what she had in mind. That would be difficult enough to do face-to-face, but still easier, she thought.